| This thesis examines how four contemporary North American playwrights and filmmakers respond to the experience of colonialism in their representations of identity. My first chapter identifies the artists I am studying as playwrights Suzan-Lori Parks and Daniel David Moses, and filmmakers Midi Onodera and Julie Dash, defines key terms, and argues that these artists' works constitute identity in the liminal space between physical, historical and cultural presence and the absence or erasure associated with the position of colonial otherness.;The thesis' subsequent chapters each examine one artist's works through the lens of liminality. Chapter 2 applies the notion of liminality to the theatrical language and to the representations of history and the body in Parks' plays. In Chapter 3, I suggest that Moses uses the figure of the ghost to convey the losses suffered by Native North Americans under colonialism, and to begin the process of individual and communal healing by referring to a shared, if idealized, Native past. Chapter 4 argues that Onodera challenges the distinction between self and other in her role as documentarist: in The Displaced View, the filmmaker explicitly occupies both positions in relation to her filmic subject, her Japanese-Canadian grandmother, to demonstrate that the other is always unknowable to some degree. Onodera's next film, Skin Deep, illustrates the dangers of the colonial fantasy of "knowing the other." My fifth chapter examines how Dash's Illusions represents the construction of colonial otherness in Hollywood film through the erasure of African-American body from "America." Dash's 1992 film, Daughters of the Dust, attempts to redress this erasure by reclaiming the physical and cultural space of African-Americans in the national history/mythology. In all the works, geographic space, history, language and the body are liminal zones in which the tension between presence and absence is played out.;The thesis concludes by asserting the usefulness of liminality for representing the unstable, shifting, divided nature of all identities. Liminal identities reveal the unity and fixity of the colonial subject as a fantasy and offer the possibility for redefining the terms of "self" and "other" or even of conceptualizing identity in entirely different ways. |
